Forum

Archaeologically Sustainable Development in an Urban Context

Author:

John C Barrett

Abstract

Archaeological deposits pose a financial risk for developers resulting from the planning constraints that are imposed by the premise that a public interest exists in those deposits and in the consequent impact that any development might have upon them. In England and Wales, those planning constraints arise from the principles now established by the National Planning Policy Framework. Here archaeological deposits are identified as being among the heritage assets that go to make up the heritage environment, and developers are required to execute works that are environmentally sustainable. My aim in this short piece is to consider what might be required of policies of heritage sustainability.

How to Cite:
Barrett, J.C., (2013). Archaeologically Sustainable Development in an Urban Context. Papers from the Institute of Archaeology. 23(1), p.Art. 19. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/pia.438

Archaeological deposits pose a financial risk for developers resulting from the planning
constraints that are imposed by the premise that a public interest exists in those
deposits and in the consequent impact that any development might have upon them. In
England and Wales, those planning constraints arise from the principles now established
by the National Planning Policy Framework. Here archaeological deposits are identified
as being among the heritage assets that go to make up the heritage environment, and
developers are required to execute works that are environmentally sustainable. My aim in
this short piece is to consider what might be required of policies of heritage
sustainability.

My dictionary defines an asset as ‘anything valuable or useful’, two
qualities that, I assume, may lie dormant in the ‘thing’ until they are
realised by means of some form of engagement (value through the market and usefulness
through deployment, for example). It would seem to follow that a policy of sustainable
development, when applied to the heritage environment, requires that the potential value
or usefulness of its assets should at least be maintained. Does this simply require the
physical preservation of those assets? Not necessarily, for perhaps the potential value
and usefulness of one heritage asset might be transferred into another that takes
another form. I assume that this thinking is what lay behind the not terribly successful
policy of ‘preservation by record’. There are obvious problems that attend
the strategy more widely in the heritage sector. For example, the value of a long
standing building at the heart of a community which is commonly treated as a point of
reference and part of an aesthetically pleasing vista is not easily transferable.
However, it does seem that the heritage asset of many such buildings is often assumed to
be embodied in their facades where value is revealed in the look of the thing, and this
has resulted in the preservation of the facade whilst the rest of the structure has been
sacrificed. We should note, however, that stone circles, castles, churches, and country
houses (among others) cannot be reasonably treated in a similar way for the simple
reason that their value is realised by occupying, exploring, and using their interiors.
The ways the value and usefulness of a heritage asset might be realised must therefore
guide our understanding of how that asset can be sustained.

The problem of establishing what constitutes sustainability in archaeological deposits
arises partly from the assumption that the potential value of any
deposit is almost entirely described by the nature of its preservation (desiccated and
eroded, or waterlogged and deeply buried) and where the realised value
is contingent upon the methodological skills of recovery and analysis. From this
perspective, the risks to the developer amount to the costs of applying the latter
(competent methods) to the former (nature of deposits). Costing in this way might appear
attractive in its directness, although in practice the scale of the unknowns (what the
deposits might actually contain) maintain a higher level of risk than either the
developer or contracting archaeologist are likely to find comfortable. Carver’s
discussion of the Crossrail project explores where the responsibilities lie in managing
those risks. The problem, however, remains: are we clear as to the ways that the process
of excavation realises the utility and value of the deposits and that it delivers
sustainable development?

Let us begin with what might constitute the utility and the value of an archaeological
asset. Perhaps its utility is that it allows us to engage with the now fragmentary
conditions of past human experiences and to investigate, and indeed debate, the
conditions and forces that operated in a past of which that human presence was obviously
a part. Any claim that our procedures are environmentally sustainable should mean that
the utility of the asset in facilitating such an enquiry is itself sustained. This
ability to bring certain aspects of the past into view and to open them to investigation
lies not in the material itself, however well preserved that may be, but in the
perspectives established by the procedures of investigation. And this is where the value
of the asset is realised, for value here is not that of commercial return but rather
what we gain from considering the perspectives that best confront the diversity and
scale of human history. We learn and see the world afresh. This is a value fashioned by
method and critical thought: it is experienced through the practical exploration of
surviving conditions? and it is a value that must be sustained if our heritage policies
deliver what they claim.

However abstract all this might sound, it is in fact blindingly simple, although
admittedly it requires an inversion in current reasoning. Do not start from the
assumption that humans make their environment, but rather that the environment makes
certain kinds of humanity possible. It does this by providing or restricting access to
resources, making or hindering the possibility of certain kinds of perception,
restricting access to spaces for some, and opening access to others. In other words, the
best way to think about the cultural environment is not from the perspective of its
making (as something imposed on the landscape) but from the perspective of the ways that
environment could be read by learning to live in an architecture of things and to gain,
or to be restricted, access to certain resources (be those resources food, security,
political authority, spiritual revelation, or whatever). In this way, people became
distributed across a spatial architecture that defined them.

The effectiveness of this approach was demonstrated in the excavation programme at
Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 (Andrews, Barrett and Lewis
2000), where the excavators were asked to realise an understanding of how the
changing forms of the landscape made possible different paths of movement and traditions
of occupancy and, on this basis, the ways in which the landscape was strategically
modified and the consequences of that modification for future inhabitation.

In the case of most urban landscapes, the archaeological engagement with archaeological
deposits is quite unlike that encountered in the large-scale open excavation possible at
Heathrow. Urban excavations are often restricted spatially by interventions into deep
deposits, where the kind of cost estimates and management procedures sketched above are
likely to apply. In the example of Crossrail, the procedures for managing the risks for
the developer of this massive infrastructure project across London have clearly been
exemplary. However, what more is required of urban excavations if they are to contribute
to environmental sustainability?

To demand that the archaeology of the urban environment makes the human history of
occupying that environment visible does not mean that we simply expose the ancient
fabric of a city. We are all familiar enough with the sad spectacle of chunks of ancient
masonry marooned and ignored in a busy thoroughfare. History is not, after all, a matter
of events, ancient relics, and the actions of ‘great’ people: these are
merely the objects of antiquarian curiosity. History concerns the processes that shape
the human world, the changing material configurations that have brought together the
flows of human energy, technologies, raw materials and the rest of nature to sustain
these places as particular environments of human existence. As I have attempted to
argue, archaeological assets are useful and achieve their value in these terms: they
allow us to understand how those conditions once operated, their consequences in
people’s lives and their resilience and fragility, as well as how they came into
being and passed away. I suggest, therefore, that archaeological assets can be
maintained (i.e., can be rendered sustainable) by transferring the value of deposits
excavated into a mosaic of resources that describe the changing conditions that shaped
those earlier human environments and have, by dint of developer investment, been made
accessible to people who might find that they enrich their experience of living and
working in those locations.

Four points follow. First, it is the archaeologist’s, and not the
developer’s, skill and responsibility to deliver sustainability of value and
usefulness by transferring the asset represented by deposits excavated into a new
medium. Second, history is contentious. The fact that Guy Fawkes was baptised in the
late medieval church of St Michael le Belfrey that stands alongside the Minster in York
(although differently aligned on the more ancient axis of Petergate) is perhaps of
passing interest. That this opens a window onto the history of recusant Catholicism in
Yorkshire and the wider struggle of the reformation in Europe has implications for an
understanding of the surviving fabric of that city, and provides the richer potential of
a journey of historical enquiry. Third, the urban landscape comprises a series of
geographically contested and overlapping spaces extending across wealth and poverty,
authority (with its own conflicts between, for example, church, state, and market), and
rebellion. How these spaces were appropriated, defined, and defended is part of a
historical narrative that has not remained buried beneath the streets but, courtesy of
archaeology, can now accompany the contemporary experience of urban life: history may be
performed simply by reoccupying the shadows of these earlier spaces. Finally, digital
media have the potential of revolutionising the ways the assets of the urban heritage
environment may be stored and accessed. The conflicting narratives that have defined a
place over time, the source materials available for further investigation, and the
challenges that future thought and investigations might address will all surely become
increasingly open to digital investigation from within those places. Enabling us to
explore the ways that historical processes were located within the resources of time and
place could therefore be offered by means of digital information that has been built, as
a sustainable heritage asset, into the fabric of the contemporary urban environment.